Arts and Organisations
Arts and Organisations
- What is the Arts and Organisations approach?
An approach that uses performance, visual and literary practice to give expression to difficult emotions, uncertainty, power and the unspoken dynamics that shape organisations and systems.
- Why use artistic practice in organisational work?
Artistic practice offers a different, often sensory and embodied kind of access. It invites reflection, imagination and emotional resonance, and helps contain tensions safely within the systems people work in.
- Who is involved in the Tavistock Institute’s Arts and Organisations work?
The Institute brings artists into dialogue with social scientists, practitioners and organisations, generating a community of artists-in-organisations across a range of arts and creativity practices and programmes.
- When is artistic practice useful?
Where ambiguity and relational complexity resist conventional research and consultancy methods, and where what matters is hard to put into words. In practice that means organisational consultancy and change work, professional development, and practice-as-research projects including work with archives and oral history.
The arts have been part of the Tavistock Institute’s transdisciplinary character for decades — a way of knowing organisations from the inside rather than observing them from outside, and one that supports complex change as well as deepening understanding of it.
Artistic practice makes the system we are working in real. It situates people inside it rather than in front of it. As more of working life moves onto screens, that grounding in the senses matters more rather than less, and it is central to what we mean by the quality of working life.
'Artistic practice offers a different kind of access, often sensory and embodied, it invites reflection, imagination, and emotional resonance, offering alternative insights into work and organisational systems and space for new possibilities.'
Juliet Scott, 2025
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